Author: Pedro

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have some trips planned for this year and the next one is schedule to happen in a couple of weeks in… Iceland! I will be there not only to visit the country, but also to visit a couple of friends.

Iceland seems to be a unique country in Europe. It is located on a small island close to Greenland, quite far away from the rest of Europe, and it has a very small number of inhabitants, an estimated value of 325 000 people in the whole country. Wikipedia lists only 9 cities (maybe towns?) with more than 5 000 inhabitants, being Reykjavík the biggest city in the country.

The people over there speak Icelandic, which it is the language most closer to the Old Norse of all the Nordic languages. And just like most of the Nordic countries, they also have their own “crown” as currency: the Icelandic Króna (ISK).

When you look up for pictures and information about the country, the first thing you will find is pictures of vast, green and rocky landscapes. The country seems to have a natural beauty that it’s hard to find in the rest of Europe, it appears to be a great place to spend a really peaceful week, away from the usual urban areas.

I’m going to be there, specifically in Reykjavík, for about 5 days. Thanks to a friend of mine (thank you Baldur!), I won’t have to worry about finding accomodation, which is a big plus since Iceland sounds to be a bit expensive, so I can worry about using money in other exciting things.

Since my last post in June 30 of last year, I haven’t made any updates to the blog.

After I finished my master’s thesis, I got hired by Synopsys and the job has been keeping me pretty busy since then. I haven’t had much time to keep this blog updated and to keep up with some updates to the UVM tutorial I had planned.

I also have been busy with some time to myself, including travelling and learning other things too. In the last months I payed a visit to Belgium and to the United Kindgom. It was not the first time I was in both countries but it felt great to visit them again. I already started to plan other trips to some exciting locations, which I might share here in the future.

Besides working and travelling, I started to learn German. Not for any particular reason, just for the fun of it. Since I studied a bit of Swedish when I was living in Gothenburg, I figured it would be interesting to tackle another Germanic language. It has been an interesting learning experience so far, I might explore this subject on this blog in a near future too.

From now on, I plan to be more active in posting updates, either related to hardware design, either to other subjects I might want to share. It will be the beginning of my personal blog.

A few weeks ago, it was suggested by the professor José Carlos Alves to use the verification environment to verify a model of an audio codec AC97. This week, all the necessary components were completed and the testbench was demonstrated.

There aren’t any major difficulties to report, it deadline is getting closer and it’s time to start writing all the necessary documentation.

I started to structure the chapters of the final document that will contain the description of my project. I also started to write a draft for each chapter in order to ease the process of writing for the next few weeks.

The last month and half that I have been studying the UVM methodology, I noticed that of all the guides and tutorials about UVM available throughout the internet, none of them reached to a complete beginner in verification.

Before starting this thesis, my knowledge of verification was very limited, it was narrowed to a simple direct tests, hand-written stimuli, and that was it. It was quite hard to find something that I could start on.

As a result, I started writing a guide that approaches verification with SystemVerilog and UVM from the ground zero. In this guide, it’s explained the most essential features and API of UVM and how can you successfully compile a complete verification environment using SystemVerilog and UVM.

I started to develop a verification environment for an I2C bus basing myself on the research I did. I’m also delayed about two weeks compared to the original plan but I expect to keep up with this delay very soon.

In the next few days, the UVM guide I have been writing will be published in this website along with the code for educational purposes.